Edith Wharton - O Filho de Duas Mães

In 1906, Edith Wharton decided to live almost permanently in Paris. There she had opportunities for social interaction that America, even though it frequently offered its table to select guests, could not provide.

And Paris also made her forget the negative aspects of her inert husband. She became involved with the American journalist Morton Fullerton, representative of The Times in France, and experienced nights of love with the intensity that her poem "Terminus" reveals (Wonderful were the long secret nights you gave me, my Lover…, we read in its first verse).

In Paris, the hectic life filled a large part of the voids that she, in her "secret room," could never fill.

She lived surrounded by male relationships ranging from Paul Bourget to Anna de Noailles, from Henry James to Howard Sturges; She feels comfortable in the midst of cultured men, in a court where she is flattered and praised, especially by homosexuals.

But this literary celebration, these successive critical and public successes, are overshadowed by a series of disappointments that touch her feelings very closely.

In 1927, Walter Berry, "her" American lawyer, the dedicatee of Proust's *Pastiches et Mélanges*, the man she called the love of her life, dies in Paris; shortly afterwards, two of her former employees die; and a valet is murdered by his wife.

Her literature reflects these bad days, filling itself with stories of bitter subtleties, pessimism, and shadows. Perhaps because of all this, in 1933 he decided to write *Her Son* (which occupies the largest number of pages in *Human Nature*), where the rivalry between two "false mothers" resolves itself in a somber defeat of splendid irony.

Edith Wharton would live for another four years. On April 11, 1935, she suffered a premonitory heart attack; another, two years later and more serious, left her locked in the Pavillon Colombes, which she had acquired seven years earlier in Saint-Brice-sous-Foret, near Paris.

She died on August 11, 1937, and was buried in the cemetery of Versailles, next to Walter Berry. [Aníbal Fernandes]